Search Agency Update – What Are Companies Up To?

Bits and bobs to keep up with search agency news: Trada/Google Ventures, IBM and Boostability

Trada, the crowdsourced paid search marketplace, announced in a blog post it raised $5.75 million from investors. The financing round was led by Google Ventures and involved founding investor Foundry Group, the companies said in a statement. The funds will be used to boost Trada’s platform and extend its reach to “serve international markets, grow its agency model and diversify beyond paid search into other types of online advertising, such as display,” Trada said.

Trada is intended for businesses and agencies spending between $5,000 and $50,000 per month in paid search and supports search marketing campaigns on Google, Yahoo And Bing. The company calls on to over 500 paid search experts. An average campaign running in Trada contains more than 6,500 keywords and 110 ads.

IBM is building an analytics platform for marketers and advertisers, Michael Haydock, IBM global lead for business analytics and optimization, told MediaPost. The report said Haydock “has been writing a strain of linear programs for asset allocation, allocating resources into customer groups and advertising media using multi-objective optimization, where customers have multiple objectives.” “He also wrote the original multi-dimensional clustering codes,” on which the suite of tools will be based. The company is expected to launch the project soon although no specific date was immediately available.

Boostability, the SEO campaign management provider, unveiled ‘Launch Pad,’ a low-cost SEO platform for agencies and media companies to service small businesses. “The platform is integrated with Google Analytics to provide the data that means the most to a small and local business. Included with analytics are ranking reports for both natural search and local (map) results,” the company said in a statement. “Our software optimizes work for the customer and delivers reporting to the partner,” Travis Thorpe co-founder and CEO commented.

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.